What many overlook is the fiscal cliff is the result intended by law, passed by both Houses and signed by Hussein. That same law also gave us the famous Supercommittee, the decision(s) of which were to be another cramdown, an amendment-free up or down Congressional vote. Fortunately, none of the 6 Repubs caved (a near thing, that) so the Supercommittee was deadlocked 6 to 6.

Personally, the longer the present shabby process goes on, the more I favor the cliff. Boehner is not the ablest negotiator, and in any event one cannot negotiate with another party that refuses to budge from its my-way-or-the-highway position .

Don Carlos: I don’t think this particular speech was about negotiation, per se. It was about putting the blame on Democrats, for a change. Of course, Boehner has a very steep uphill climb to make that charge stick, considering how few in the MSM will either report it or back him up, and how many will try to make sure the shoe is on the other foot.

I’d just been pondering, the incumbent is not at all a leader — not in any sense of the word that makes any sense to me — and Boehner is no negotiator. (Not that the incumbent is a negotiator.)

If we were going to go this route to begin with, I wish Boehner had played it for all the media attention he could get. Do I applaud/blame him? . . .

Not sure; I don’t know what else I might have done, other than not even pretend to negotiate with the Winner-in-Chief to begin with, but I’m very not sure of myself here. Can’t say what would have been the best approach, especially given the mainstream media’s proclivity to and insistence on seeing all bad as the “R” people’s fault, and all good as the “D” people’s doing.

MJR- Hussein does not negotiate, in the sense that negotiation leads to a compromise agreed to by the negotiants. Hussein stonewalls, he threatens, he intimidates, he blusters, and he reneges. all ably done, He does not negotiate. Neither did MacArthur with the Japanese surrender, which was sans conditions for the Nips.

Don Carlos, 12:38 am — “Hussein does not negotiate, in the sense that negotiation leads to a compromise agreed to by the negotiants. Hussein stonewalls, he threatens, he intimidates, he blusters, and he reneges.”

This is what a community organizer does, and community organizer is all the incumbent has ever done [outside of teaching]. It’s all he ^knows^ how to do.

God help us.

Wait ’till he “negotiates” with Putin or Ahmadenijad, when he is not against them but in sympathy with them.

As Isoroku Yamamoto said to Emperor Hirohito after he was asked if he could destroy the US fleet at Pearl Harbor he answered “yes” (short version) but asked the Emperor: “And then what?”
Boehner knows this bill, if he gets it past his own party, is DOA in the Senate. Obama will never even see it. Which was always the case. If it’s really a diabolically clever plan to get the democrats to vote against tax cuts, why not force them to vote against spending cuts too? I may have misunderstood proposal, but Hannity was reporting there were none. If true, is this something so clever it took 18 months to craft? I’m thinking it’s something they could have done a month ago and got the slap-down out of the way earlier.
IMO, he wasted another opportunity today to try and make a case for WHY it’s important that we cannot maintain this present trajectory of spending. Explain why it’s the most important issue facing us, and in fact a few thousand people paying higher taxes might make a few million feel good, but it will not stop the freight train of debt that’s going to slam into, and obliterate our economy and way of life. Maybe talking about all this would not change things, but it sure would be nice to see a clear explanation of the position I think we voted for him to defend and promote.
Instead of showing the face of a tenacious and passionate leader, he lumbered out to the podium like Oscar Madison after a tiff with Felix about whose turn it was to take out the trash, and spent 60s daring Obama to be Obama.
So this is the master “Plan B”? Is ‘B’ for Boehner or Bonehead?
Obama or Harry Reid will spend a few minutes telling outrageous lies in a convincing manner, answering questions,, and say “The republicans are willing to let taxes go up on everyone to protect a few rich people”. And then what? Democrats don’t care if taxes go up. That’s what they believe in. The notion that they’re suddenly for tax cuts is funny. They will spin it as investments or something else, but I’m more than sure they have an outrageous contingency plan for it, including a whole line of baloney to hand out which the media will lap up. If only our guys spent some time thinking ahead.
But Boehner’s is simply unable and unwilling to articulate what he wants to accomplish.
At least it’s somewhat amusing now – a little imagination and you can picture Boehner as Wiley Coyote, and Obama as the Road Runner. What Acme trap will Wiley Boehner spring next? What goofy contraption will he try next?
Or will Wiley Boehner, go over the fiscal cliff, and then stand up in time for the boulder to land on his head?

southpaw: as I said earlier, I’m not at all optimistic about the strategy, but it’s explained (or at least, guessed at) here:

I think the Speaker has been disatisfied with the media coverage of Plan B thus far. By keeping his statement to 56 seconds, he basically gets to choose the content of the clip used by the broadcast evening newscasts this evening. Yesterday, Boehner said he was still open to negotiations with President Obama. This is a direct rebuke to Obama’s noon presser wherein he said he would not negotiate over many aspects of the fiscal cliff.

House GOP has been whipping Plan B since yesterday. Americans for Tax Reform (Norquist’s outfit) is for it, Heritage Action is against it. I’d say Boehner’s got the votes.

We often forget that what we see on the news is not the totality of what a politician has said. I don’t know what Boehner has done or not done; I only know what’s been covered by the press. Perhaps he’s even articulated all sorts of things that we just haven’t heard about. I’m not saying he has; I’m just saying that unless a person is glued to C-SPAN, you really wouldn’t know, would you? The press is the gatekeeper for most of this; the key is to try to play it. And the press is for the most part determined not to let Republicans do that successfully.

I would add that in order to negotiate, you have to know something about the issues. Obama is bored by such things, and he doesn’t really care about anything except looking tough and coming out good in polling feedback. That is what makes him such an atrocious president. He was brought up on platitudes such as fairness, but you can only count on him to stick with a program until he has to pay a political price. Then it’s under the bus. With the help of the MSM, he is very good at hiding his inconsistencies. He really doesn’t care about tax rates or budgets. He wants to be seen as sticking it to the rich white man– Hollywood and WS donor types somewhat excepted.

Do that, and you see that the whole thing is an exercise in demonstrating who has the power, and so who should be followed, good or bad.

Your not all used to power politics, as until this past two elections, its been about other things, not about pure power.

i have said, there are two kinds of power people. the good power people where power itself is incidental and the point is to achieve a positive goal. and power for powers sake, where the only way to FEEL it is to compel people to do things they dont want to do, but due to power have to do.

few ruminate on the implications of what i say and so reach the derivation and outcomes.

your all playing go fish, and this is canasta

you keep wanting to analyse this in terms of battling to a positive outcome that the constituency believe, but what you have is power for powers sake.

Go back to George Kennan and see why i said to read it to work out the implications. he talks about this mentality and how it would negate cooperation and all that kind of positive power. and he even pointed out, that they are so bent on power, they never work on governance, or good outcomes (for other than their power), and so on. (just as mentioned above astutely – “whats next?”)

Quoting Kennans Long TelegramAnd they have learned to seek security only in patient but deadly struggle for total destruction of rival power, never in compacts and compromises with it.

does the above sound familiar?
i am still wondering when people will be interested to learn about the opposition rather than play guessing games that leaves them ALWAYS confused. to the point where they love their confusion as its a thing to twiddle with, not resolve.

So it is said that if you know your opponent and know yourself, you can win a hundred battles without a single loss.
If you only know yourself, but not your opponent, you may win or may lose.
If you know neither yourself nor your enemy, you will always endanger yourself.

back to george kennan

In this dogma, with its basic altruism of purpose, they found justification for their instinctive fear of outside world, for the dictatorship without which they did not know how to rule, for cruelties they did not dare not to inflict, for sacrifice they felt bound to demand.

In the name of Marxism they sacrificed every single ethical value in their methods and tactics. Today they cannot dispense with it. It is fig leaf of their moral and intellectual respectability.

They do not know how to govern, and to do what they want to do, they need total power, and the ignoring of the outcome of their actions on the public.

they do not know how to cooperate, play nice, not cheat, etc. Once they went down that road, there was no turning back, since once your spoiled your spoiled.

its a world view that sees other powers as things to crush, either directly, or by pitting them against each other.

in order to get what he says, you have to change his labeling of who he talks about if one cant put it aside as just a label.

Finally we have the unsolved mystery as to who, if anyone, in this great land actually receives accurate and unbiased information about outside world.

In atmosphere of oriental secretiveness and conspiracy which pervades this Government, possibilities for distorting or poisoning sources and currents of information are infinite.

The very disrespect of Progressives for objective truth–indeed, their disbelief in its existence–leads them to view all stated facts as instruments for furtherance of one ulterior purpose or another.

There is good reason to suspect that this Government is actually a conspiracy within a conspiracy; and I for one am reluctant to believe that Obama himself receives anything like an objective picture of outside world.

Agencies utilized for promulgation of policies on this plane are following:
3. A wide variety of national associations or bodies which can be dominated or influenced by such penetration. These include: labor unions, youth leagues, women’s organizations, racial societies, religious societies, social organizations, cultural groups, liberal magazines, publishing houses, etc.

that was February 22, 1946…

you only had to believe what he said and how well he knew the product of the version of the ideology. Where did Obama’s mother and father meet? “Obama’s parents met in 1960 in a Russian class at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, where his father was a foreign student on scholarship”

ya have to love something a lot to want to learn the original tongue. regular people wont even bother with a surface examination, but worshipers will not only read everything, they will hang out with professors, and seek out such, and learn the language that holds the largest body of works, and so on..

IF you take all that into account, the whole idea of what Obama is doing has nothing to do with governance of the people. he could care less, and so all points as to good or bad in that way are silly. its only whether such things are good and bad for them, of which people squealing and starving is good, very good for them.

he, as part of gliechshaltung, is crushing the power of the opposition. what your seeing is the opposition trying to pretend they have any say. Obama is holding his thumb down, and regardless of what republicans want, what Obama wants is what will happen.

its just power for powers sake as they cant function without that level of power, and being bound by having to think in terms of what others want, and not just themselves.

they are acting very true to their form
its just most here have no experience or desire to learn at all about that form, and keep wanting to think its akin to what they know and have no other (or very little) knowledge of given the more positive nice nature of their society (in general).

expat, Hussein does not negotiate nor does he want to negotiate. He means us harm, and he is good and tough at that.
We should have learned by now how dangerous it is to underestimate an enemy. He isn’t bored; he is malign.

Neo – fair point and hard to argue with it, only Boehner is not playing this game in a way that garners positive attention. There are 2 sides to his problems – the first is tactical, and he’s definitely in a hole there. The second problem is he’s a dud to cover. You may be correct, and we don’t see the whole picture. But don’t you agree that if he, or anyone for that matter is interesting and charismatic, they naturally get better coverage, and to some extent, a pass?
A little humor, some pointed sarcasm, some rhetoric, some personality. And I happen to think Wiley Coyote is a lot funnier than John Boehner, but their results (so far) are about the same.
I think his last press conference, although appealing to people who are no-nonsense, get to the point voters, was a good example of how not to win friends and influence people. He COULD spend a few minutes talking to THEM. Having a conversation with THEM, and not simply make a statement, turn on his heel, and lumber off.
He lacks the ability to establish a rapport with the press, and apparently, with the conservatives in his own house..
Sucessful politicians on the national stage need to be able to talk to work better with people and make a few friends — they may not agree — but they would follow him (in the case of the Tea Party), and in the case of the press, possibly cover a statement or two.
I don’t know how to express this very well myself, but for lack of a better words – he’s boring and pedantic – or to your point, that’s all the footage we see. Perhaps he has them spellbound for 20 minutes, laughing and bantering back and forth – I’m not convinced, but it’s possible.
We need a better messenger. Imagery and perception are enormously important in modern politics, obviously more so than competence on issues, as Obama has proved to the point of agony on our part. JB is simply not a good front man.

I don’t disagree that he is malign, but I do think it stems from the fact that he finds the actual work boring in comparison to standing in the lights. He even said as much when he was in the Illinois legislature. He also finds the suburbs boring. He has survived by deflecting attention to subjects where he can appear to have superior knowledge. It’s a shame no one made him mow grass or pick up road trash with the Boy Scouts when he was a kid. He is a lazy thinker who has been applauded all his life.

About Me

Previously a lifelong Democrat, born in New York and living in New England, surrounded by liberals on all sides, I've found myself slowly but surely leaving the fold and becoming that dread thing: a neocon. Read More >>